Emotional Intelligence
Listen: “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac
In 1995, Danial Goleman published his best-selling book Emotion Intelligence. I was always reading books on leadership, and Goleman’s book struck a deep chord in me. His thesis was simple: Emotional intelligence (EI) is a better indicator of leadership performance than IQ. I immediately resonated with this idea based on my experience and intuition. By the late 90’s when I first read his book, I was leading a growing church of several hundred people meeting in a middle school, raising funds to purchase thirty acres of land and build a church, and developing a pastoral and volunteer team of over one hundred people.
Goleman believed a leader could grow and develop a set of five EI competencies which would enhance leadership skills including:
Self-awareness: the ability to know one’s emotions, strengths, and weaknesses and recognize their impact on others;
Self-regulation: the ability to manage one’s disruptive emotions;
Social skills: the ability to manage relationships;
Empathy: the ability to consider other people’s emotions when leading and making decisions;
Motivation: the ability to discern what motivates others.
By 2018, I had lead the church to almost three decades of explosive growth and a volunteer ministry team of over 2,000 people. Despite the success in church growth and my application of EI skills, I still went through a personal meltdown.
As I look back, I think my practice of self-regulation was done in an unhealthy way. What do I mean? (Be sure and read my blog: https://spiritualityadventures.com/blog/a-good-death.)
It’s possible to be self-aware of negative, unpleasant, or disruptive emotions and actually attempt to over-regulate these emotions in an unhealthy way. When I experienced negative emotions, I always tried to battle, suppress, and conquer my negative emotions. I would try to fight them and beat them. This is an unhealthy approach in the long run. I practiced this approach for forty years of my life, and became a harsh critic of myself.
Current research shows that negative, unpleasant, or disruptive emotions need to be recognized, allowed, investigated, and nurtured (research from the fields of psychology, sociology, and neuroscience all agree on this approach). It’s a practice I’ve learned through mindfulness meditation called RAIN. (I will write more on the practice of RAIN in a future blog.)
It seems antithetical. When we experience a negative emotion, we naturally want to avoid it, push back against it, or numb it. Why would we want to change our tactic?
Research has shown that what we resist tends to persist. Fighting and resisting negative emotions actually escalates and empowers them over time. Marc Brackett is the Director of Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. He is an advocate for introducing emotional intelligence training in public schools. As important as reading, writing, arithmetic, and science are, EI is even more important. And yet, most people have had zero formal training in EI.
Brackett wrote an excellent book which lays out his vision for EI entitled Permission to Feel: Unlocking the Power of Emotions to Help Our Kids, Ourselves, and Our Society Thrive. Brackett shows how just learning to recognize our negative emotions and name them is a healthy way to begin to heal and regulate our emotions.
Mindfulness meditation teaches us to sit with our negative emotions with openness, curiosity, and self-compassion. Think of how a therapist listens to a client’s negative emotions, acknowledges them, names them, validates them, and helps to investigate them. A therapist would never condemn a person for having negative emotions. I’ve never heard a good therapist say, “You shouldn’t feel that way.” Yet we beat ourselves up all the time for feeling certain ways. Many of us have a vicious self-critic banging around in our head. A therapist helps a client get in touch with those emotions in order to learn, heal, and grow through them.
Meditation teaches us to sit with our body, our emotions, and our thoughts like a good therapist for our own selves. It teaches us to be as kind and loving to our own selves as we would be towards a beloved family member, friend, or pet.
Inviting our negative, unpleasant, or disruptive emotions to sit with us for a loving, compassionate conversation is an extremely important step towards understanding, healing, and regulating our unpleasant emotions.
“Good morning fear. Good morning anger. Good morning regrets. Good morning anxiety. How are you today? Let’s have a talk.” Once you listen for a while, they calm down and relax. You might even learn something. They just need to be heard and held with love and compassion, like you would hold and comfort a hurting loved one.
Compassion and love grows and expands from ourselves to others, to the planet, and to the Universe. Love never fails.
Shalom
©realfredherron, 2023
